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<div class="essay" id="body.1_div.1">
<h3 align="center">Austen's Competition: Teaching the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Century Literary
Marketplaces</h3>
<p xmlns=""><strong>Emily C. Friedman</strong><br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><strong>Auburn University</strong></p>
<p xmlns=""><strong></strong><br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><strong></strong></p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">1</strong>. Prior to my current job, I did not consider myself an “Austen scholar.” That said, I
have long used Jane Austen as a way to anchor and engage students, which is the
subject of this essay. I am aware that the Austen name sells not only her six
complete novels, but endless adaptations, action figures, how-to guides, and other
material. Within academia, Austen is a name to conjure with in times of declining
enrollments: whether or not a student has read Jane Austen, the odds are high that
they recognize the name. Rare is the institution where a course with Austen in the
title will not fill rapidly.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>2</strong>. This is a double-edged sword: as an eighteenth-centuryist, I am keenly (and sometimes
uncomfortably) aware of the way that Austen becomes an alpha and omega: the end of
the eighteenth-century, and the opening salvo into what will be the Victorian novel.
To people outside my profession, I found myself short-handing the “what do you
study/teach?” question with “the stuff before and around Jane Austen.” My official
specialty is the long eighteenth-century, a period roughly bounded (depending on who
you ask) by the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the beginning of Victoria’s
reign in 1837. Within my department my duties at the undergraduate level usually
include the first half of the British survey (ending in 1778), the eighteenth-century
novel course, and the late eighteenth-century/Romantic period course called the “Age
of Revolutions” (1770-1830).</p>
<p class=" "><strong>3</strong>. This essay will primarily discuss a course that fell outside of the typical
curricular needs I fill. In the fall of 2011, the annual course titled
nineteenth-century novel needed to be covered and our usual Victorianist faculty were
busy with leave and other administrative duties. The course is offered often enough
that it is not taught as a survey, but as a topics course depending on the
instructor’s particular interests, so long as the novels covered were produced
between 1800 and 1899. I was asked, and accepted the offer to teach the course.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>4</strong>. What emerged was a class I called the “not-Austen” course: a course that invoked
Austen in its title and referred back to Austen often without itself being an
“Austen” course. I will show how courses can be fruitfully haunted by Austen. In
addition, this course allowed me to experiment with a final project that has had a
long life beyond this one course. Thus, I will also describe how the original course
and its final editing assignment has dramatically altered the ways in which I teach
my upper-division courses.</p>
<div class="section" id="body.1_div.1_div.1">
<h4 align="center">The Course</h4>
<p class=" "><strong>5</strong>. It’s perhaps no surprise that when asked to teach a nineteenth-century novel
course I would ask for permission to teach the course as an <em xmlns="">early</em>
nineteenth-century course. My very first use of Austen-as-rationale was in its
title: “Two Hundred Years Since: Austen's Sister-Novelists in the Literary
Marketplace” a title that obviously made use of Austen’s popularity (or at least
name recognition) and more subtly nodded to Austen’s fellow-author Walter Scott,
whose first novel <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Waverley</span> (1814) was subtitled “’Tis
Sixty Years Since.” </p>
<p class=" "><strong>6</strong>. For the purposes of the course, “Austen’s Literary Marketplace” was encapsulated
in less than two decades, spanning from 1800 until her death in 1817. This focus
could, with different justifications, be both narrower and wider: Austen’s first
published novel, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Sense and Sensibility</span>, did not appear
until 1811, though Austen had been attempting to publish her work ever since 1797,
when her father unsuccessfully offered <span xmlns="" class="titlem">First Impressions</span>
(later <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Pride and Prejudice</span>) to Thomas Cadell for
consideration. Those who might wish to widen the scope still further could of
course reach back to Austen’s many influences: <span xmlns="" class="titlem">First
Impressions</span>, after all, was initially pitched as “about the length of
Miss Burney's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Evelina</span>” according to J.A.
Austen-Leigh–invoking a novel published in 1778. Equally justly, one could expand
beyond Austen’s death date, especially as the last two novels, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Northanger Abbey</span> and <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Persuasion</span>, were
published posthumously. This particular course could not, by the parameters set by
the department, reach backward, and I was loath to reach much further beyond. </p>
<p class=" "><strong>7</strong>. This narrow focus was repeatedly invoked in student evaluations as an aid to a
feeling of student mastery. Even in a class with mostly English majors, Austen is
known often only as a cultural signifier: erroneously referred to as "Victorian,"
representative of a certain set of costume-drama social codes—we know the
shorthand "Austen" often stands for. Students were quickly yanked out of their
preconceived notions about Austen's world by exposure to a variety of novelists
working as rivals to Austen, many of whom couldn't be more different from one
another. My goal was to explode their notion of what novels of the period were by
showing them a diverse range of fiction produced in the same years that Austen was
writing and publishing. Thus, it became unofficially known as the “Not-Austen”
course.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>8</strong>. Auburn’s enrollment system means that students register early and very little
shuffling occurs after the registration period, so I was able to email students
and ask them to read Austen’s<span xmlns="" class="titlem"> Pride and Prejudice</span> for the
first week of class. At a different institution with different enrollment rhythms,
I might reserve early time in the semester to guide the students through a reading
of the novel; in the course as taught, students made repeated reference to the
novel throughout, with shifting understandings of this “baseline” text.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>9</strong>. In the course of the semester, students read Mary Robinson’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem"><a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="link_ref" href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/robinson/mrletterfrst.htm" title="A Letter to the Women of England">A
Letter to the Women of England</a></span> and <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Natural
Daughter</span> (1799), Elizabeth Hamilton’s<span xmlns="" class="titlem"> Memoirs of
Modern Philosophers</span> (1800), Anne Plumptre’s<span xmlns="" class="titlem"> Something
New</span> (1801), Maria Edgeworth’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Castle Rackrent
</span>(1800), Lady Owenson’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Wild Irish Girl</span>
(1806), Hannah More’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Coelebs in Search of a Wife </span>(1809),
Jane Porter’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Scottish Chiefs</span> (1810) and the
anonymously-published <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Woman of Colour</span> (1808). These
novels were selected in part for their availability in teachable classroom
editions: for example, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Wild Irish Girl</span> and <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Castle Rackrent</span> have been printed together in a Riverside
Edition, and Broadview and Valancourt each have an enormous number of texts from
the period. Length was of course also a consideration, though one of the most
popular texts of the semester was the substantial <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Scottish
Chiefs</span>.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>10</strong>. These long readings were punctuated by in-class readings of reviews and readings
about the novel form from Cheryl L. Nixon’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Novel Definitions: An
Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688-1815</span>. Depending on its
length, a single review takes approximately 5-8 minutes in class for students to
read with care, and they incorporate well into larger discussions. I began the
semester with Nixon’s collection of prize-winning student essays on “The Love of
Novels” from <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Juvenile Library</span> (1800). Each essay is
extremely brief, and the authors are a few years younger than my students (14 or
15). Moreover, the question “Whether such a Love of Novels as excludes all other
reading, or no reading at all, is most to be condemned?” resonates strongly with
students familiar with the debates over Young Adult (YA) literature, especially
the debate between the camp of “at least they’re reading” and that of “YA is
brain-rotting and dangerous.” From the very first day, they understand that the
novel’s history is one of an ongoing debate about its status, and its effects on
its readers. Nixon’s anthology is full of similar essays and reviews from various
eighteenth-century voices, and my students became deeply interested in these
debates. Later in the semester, students were assigned to lead discussion on some
of these assigned in-class readings, which I had chosen both to pair well with the
novels as well as highlight different definitions and anxieties about the novel in
the period. Edgeworth’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Castle Rackrent </span>is usefully
discussed in light of her thoughts on books in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">A Practical
Education</span> (1798), for example. Nixon’s book is, as its full title
suggests, useful for a much more substantial survey of the novel, but contains
enough material within the two decades of this course to fill the semester. </p>
<p class=" "><strong>11</strong>. In a similar fashion, the data held in Cardiff University’s open-access <span xmlns="" class="titlem"><a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="link_ref" href="http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk/search.asp" title="British Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception">British
Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and
Reception</a></span> can also be fruitfully used to provide this sort of
initial access. That database incorporates information about a book’s initial
format, later editions and translations in the period, publisher information, and
correspondence where available, as well as advertisements, reviews, and anecdotal
information from private correspondence. Moreover, it includes information about
subscribers and which circulating libraries owned copies, allowing students to
discover important information about the way the reading public gained access to
the fiction of the day.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="body.1_div.1_div.2">
<h4 align="center">Final Project: Making A Scholarly Edition</h4>
<p class=" "><strong>12</strong>. Parallel to this analysis of Austen's literary marketplace was an investigation of
the modern literary marketplace. Thus, in addition to key term exams,
discussion-leading, and weekly responses, students were responsible for creating a
proposal for a modern classroom edition of an early nineteenth-century text not
yet edited. This aspect of the course might not have happened but for its
experimental nature, but it also had some clear influences, most explicitly
assignments created by Miranda Yaggi and Marta Kvande.<a href="#1"> [1]</a><a name="back1"> </a> I have worked with special collections
librarians each semester in my courses since I was a graduate student, from
surveys to graduate seminars, and was eager to do more. Because the focus of the
“Not-Austen” course was so tight, I created a series of scaffolded assignments
that allowed us to take advantage of the students’ emerging depth of knowledge and
apply it to a concrete project.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>13</strong>. Prior to the start of the semester, I sat down with Greg Schmidt, one of the
librarians in Special Collections, and we made a list of the materials we hold
from the period under consideration so that students could select from a
controlled lists of texts. These texts were checked against commonly-available
modern editions as well as resources like the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography to ensure that at least some information about the author and other
contextual information would be readily available to a diligent, if novice,
researcher.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>14</strong>. It is worth noting at this point that I work at a flagship state institution in
the South with decidedly modest physical holdings in eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century texts in our Special Collections; our institution is renowned
for its engineering school and for other STEM fields. Thus, like many other
institutions, database access can be spotty: we do have Eighteenth-Century
Collections Online (ECCO), but microforms are considered sufficient for access to
the holdings that are now offered as periodical databases like the Burney
Collection of British Newspapers, British Periodicals I and II, and other major
literary-historical databases such as Early English Books Online (EEBO). Because
of our geographical location, the nearest institutions with more substantial
holdings are over an hour or two away, often in the bordering state of Georgia. </p>
<p class=" "><strong>15</strong>. I mention all of this because while this course represents certain kinds of
privilege (curricular freedom, multiple offerings in my subfield each year, modest
teaching load, some access to major databases), I also navigate a series of uneven
challenges as well. In this case, we found we needed to expand our list to include
texts from the 1820s, as well as to embrace multiple genres (plays, poetry, and
short stories) in order to create a substantial list of available choices. </p>
<p class=" "><strong>16</strong>. Within the first two weeks of the course, students were taken to Special
Collections for an introductory session, where students were guided through both
relevant works they might choose as well as supplementary resources they might use
to consult as they researched their primary text. On that day they completed a
substantial two-page worksheet analyzing one text of their choice, examining the
physical and bibliographic features of the work in order to understand the initial
audience [see Appendix 1]. As they found themselves gravitating to one text or
another, they also began to talk to one another and discuss group formation.
Ultimately, while most groups selected novels, one group selected a volume of
short stories, and two groups selected collections of poetry.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>17</strong>. Each group had to read their chosen text, select a suitable amount to edit, and
use that as the basis for a proposal for a modern edition. Composed in Word for
the sake of (relative) simplicity, and ultimately submitted in both hard copy and
PDF form, each "edition" proposal included justifications for their editorial
choices, a group-written critical introduction, and sample chapters, as well as
individual appendices. These appendices were primary source texts related in some
fashion to the main text, which they individually edited to confirm to “house
style.” Groups had a choice of how to convey extratextual information, but they
were required to include some form of notes (either footnotes or endnotes). Each
student also produced a critical essay on an aspect of their text. Group tasks
were paralleled by individual tasks that demonstrated the same skills: individual
and group text selection, editing and layout assignments, and individual and group
papers. This mitigated some of the pitfalls of group work: unfair distribution of
labor, etc.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>18</strong>. This project was aided immensely by my colleagues at Auburn: in addition to the
work done by Greg Schmidt in Special Collections, English subject librarian Jaena
Alabi guided students through hands-on research in order to find appropriate
appendix items and scholarship (if any) on their individual text, as well as
crafting useful footnotes. In hands-on lab time, my colleague in Technical and
Professional Communication Derek Ross and his graduate students taught students
about the basic principles of document design to guide their layout. During this
in-class session, each group agreed on a “house style” and helped design an
appropriate cover for their work. Students designed their own covers, relying on
discussions they had with Brett McLethan of Broadview Press, who made himself
available for questions about publishing and acquisition practices. In a later
version of this course, Brett also brought a sample pricing sheet, which opened
students’ eyes still further to the costs incurred even before books are printed
and bound.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>19</strong>. During the last class day, students created exhibits in Special Collections
featuring their proposals, including posters that advertised and explained their
text, including examples of the transformation from nineteenth into twenty-first
century type, historical and cultural information, and the like. They were able to
display “their” editions alongside the original early-nineteenth-century
originals. Because the final product was turned in both as hardcopy and PDF, we
are able to display the physical copies in Special Collections, and are currently
working on how best to curate their work digitally on the Library website.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>20</strong>. The groups from the first iteration of the course chose a diverse set of texts.
Perhaps the most ambitious group tackled Robert Charles Dallas’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Percival, or Nature Vindicated</span> (1801), the only full-length novel
selected by any group. Two groups selected collections of “tales” by the novelist
Maria Edgeworth: one group editing her <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Moral Tales for Young
People</span> (1809), another <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Tales of Fashionable
Life</span> (1809). One group selected a work of poetry: Maria De Fleury’s
<span xmlns="" class="titlem">Divine Poems and Essays on Various Subjects</span> (1804).
The gravitation of students towards works that contain shorter fiction or poetry
rather than a full-length novel is not very surprising in retrospect. While the
intent of our initial curated list of works was to provide precisely this sort of
diversity, I now think that more would be gained from more uniformity of text
length and genre.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>21</strong>. According to students, this assignment opened their eyes in a variety of ways: to
the rationale behind the cost of their assigned novels, to new career
possibilities, and to the historical context in which these texts were written.
Several students have gone on to take courses in document design as well as the
eighteenth-century novel. Two members of this group, Shelby Chase and Amelia
Dixon, would go on in the spring of 2013 to present their work to the
University-wide Undergraduate Research Forum, where they won first prize. </p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="body.1_div.1_div.3">
<h4 align="center">Later Variations</h4>
<p class=" "><strong>22</strong>. After the success of the “Not-Austen” class and its final assignment, I adapted
the assignment for my eighteenth-century novel course. Because of the challenges
of text selection encountered in the prior course, in this version the class
worked as a single group, and I selected the text to be edited, assigned
individual students chapters, and built the class around it. The novel was Mary
Brunton’s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Self-Control</span> (1811), a novel that draws richly
upon a variety of prior novels from across the eighteenth century, and was
unavailable in a modern classroom edition.<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" href="#2"> [2]</a><a name="back2"> </a> The
novel also has the virtue of being available online in a plain-text form without
notes,<a href="#3"> [3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> so
students could focus on the work of formatting, creating notes, etc. rather than
transcription. Similar work could be done with texts from Project Gutenberg,
though they do not provide information about the source edition, eliminating a key
piece of information. HathiTrust or Google Books, because they are presented as
PDFs, generally include the relevant bibliographic data, though they do require
transcription. Instructors wishing to replicate this assignment will often thus
need to choose between the competing goods of the convenience of cut-and-paste and
the important contextual cues. Given that my goal with this assignment is to
impress upon students the importance of reliable and judicious selection of source
text, I sacrifice convenience. </p>
<p class=" "><strong>23</strong>. In the editing portion of the Brunton class assignment, technical writing graduate
student Stephen Carradini and I guided the class through the decisions relevant to
creating a style sheet, which they discussed and voted on during class time. As
with the first iteration of the course, students produced appendices and critical
essays. If the edited text is read and given some class time at the beginning of
the semester, this approach can work well for classes where access to original
texts is particularly limited. As I have noted in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Women’s
Writing</span>, Brunton was a direct contemporary with Jane Austen, and Austen
read <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Self-Control </span>with initial anxiety that they might be
writing in the same territory–though Austen found herself relieved.</p>
<p class=" "><strong>24</strong>. In the spring of 2014 I taught my first class in a new active learning space, the
<a class="link_ref" href="http://auburn.edu/easl/" title="E.A.S.L.">E.A.S.L.</a> (Engaged Active Student
Learning) classroom being piloted at Auburn. This classroom is designed in five
“pods” that can allow groups of up to nine students to work together with a shared
oversized monitor, glassboards, and wireless connections that allow students to
collaborate using their laptops or any mobile device that uses the iOS or Android
operating platforms. As of this writing, I am beginning my first course in that
classroom that includes a group editing component. Because such a classroom is
designed to work best with in-class projects, I plan to shift more of the work of
editing and researching into the classroom. This shift will allow me to more
directly guide students through the work of editing while allowing me to return to
the smaller-group format of the first version of the assignment. </p>
<p class=" "><strong>25</strong>. This course also has a further afterlife. In 2015, my colleague Derek Ross and I
will team-teach a course on the “History of the Book in Theory and Practice,”
where we hope to deepen and broaden the scaffolding around the previous iterations
of the course. This course will give the students the ability to encounter both
historical and modern methods of print production in a hands-on manner, embedding
the textual editing assignment in the context of more reading in book history. It
is our hope that we will be able to have our public and professional writing
students will better understand the origins of terms and practices they learn in
their document design and editing courses, while our literature students better
understand the history and transformations that are connected to changing forms of
media production. As unlikely as it seemed at the start, all of these future
courses have their grounding in the experiment of the “Not-Austen”
course.<span xmlns="" id="index.xml-pb-NB02CB"><!--anchor--></span></p>
<p xmlns="" style="page-break-before: always"></p>
</div>
<div class="citations" id="body.1_div.1_div.4">
<h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Anonymous.<span xmlns="" class="titlem"> The Woman of Colour</span>. Ed. Lyndon J.
Dominique. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2007. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Austen, Jane. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane
Austen: Pride and Prejudice</span>. Ed. Pat Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2013. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Austen-Leigh, J. E. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">A Memoir of Jane Austen. </span>London:
Richard Bentley," 1870. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Brunton, Mary. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Self-Control</span>. Ed. Anthony Mandal.
London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Butler, Marilyn. “<a class="link_ref" href="http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/904" title="Austen, Jane (1775–1817)">Austen, Jane (1775–1817)</a>.” <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography</span>. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2004. Web. Jan. 2010. .</p>
<p class="hang">Friedman, Emily. "Austen Among the Fragments: Understanding the Fate of <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Sanditon</span>" <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Rethinking Influence, 1680-1830.
</span>Spec. issue of <span xmlns="" class="titlej">Women's Writing</span> 20.1 (2013):
115–29. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Garside, P.D., J. E. Belanger, and S. A. Ragaz. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">British
Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation &amp;
Reception</span>, designer A. A. Mandal. Web.
&lt;http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk&gt; </p>
<p class="hang">Labrocca, P. J. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Mary Brunton</span>. 2003. Web. &lt;
http://labrocca.com/marybrunton/&gt;</p>
<p class="hang">More, Hannah. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Coelebs in Search of a Wife. </span>Ed.
Patricia Demers. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2007. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Nixon, Cheryl. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary
on the Novel, 1688–1815.</span> Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2009.
Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Plumptre, Anne.<span xmlns="" class="titlem"> Something New</span>. Ed. Deborah McLeod.
Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1996. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Porter, Jane. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Scottish Chiefs</span>. Ed. Fiona Price.
Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2007. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Robinson, Mary. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">A Letter to the Women of England and The
Natural Daughter. </span>Ed. Sharon M. Setzer. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview,
2003. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Hamilton, Elizabeth. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.
</span>Ed. Claire Grogan. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2000. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Smith, James M., ed. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Two Irish National Tales: Maria
Edgeworth, </span>Castle Rackrent<span xmlns="" class="titlem">, Sydney Owenson, Lady
Morgan, </span>The Wild Irish Girl. New Riverside Editions. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2004. Print.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="notes">
<div class="noteHeading"><h3>Notes</h3></div>
<div class="note"><p class="letnote"><a name="1">[1] </a>As a graduate instructor at Indiana University, Yaggi had led
her students through an assignment culminating in digital editions of short
Victorian-era texts to be posted online. Kvande, an associate professor at
Texas Tech, has her graduate students do bibliographic work on texts found in
Texas Tech's collections. <a href="#back1">BACK</a></p></div>
<div class="note"><p class="letnote"><a name="2">[2] </a> A new
edition by Anthony Mandal was since published in November 2013 as part of
Pickering and Chatto’s Chawton House Library series. See Brunton. <a href="#back2">BACK</a></p></div>
<div class="note"><p class="letnote"><a name="3">[3] </a> See P.J Labrocca’s website <a class="link_ref" href="http://labrocca.com/marybrunton/" title="Mary Brunton">Mary Brunton</a>. <a href="#back3">BACK</a></p></div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31530">Pedagogies</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/austen">Teaching Jane Austen</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/friedman-emily-c">Friedman, Emily C.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jane-austen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Austen</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2179" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">history of the book</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1728" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">women writers</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/582" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">editing</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-xml-tei field-type-link-field field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">XML:TEI:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/austen/pedagogies.commons.2015.friedman.xml" target="_blank" class="teiButton">XML : TEI</a></div></div></section>Tue, 14 Apr 2015 14:00:15 +0000rc-admin57446 at http://www.rc.umd.eduLeFavour, "Acting 'Natural': Vanity Fair and the Unmasking of Anglo-American Sentiment"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sullenfires/lefavour/lefavour_essay.html
<div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/index.html">Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="title">
<div align="center">
<h2>Sullen Fires Across the
Atlantic:<br />
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</h2>
</div>
<h3 align="center">Acting "Natural": <em>Vanity Fair</em>
and<br />
the Unmasking of Anglo-American Sentiment</h3>
<h4 align="center">Cree LeFavour, New York
University</h4>
</div>
<div id="content">
<ol>
<li>
<p>A popular hit in the United States, W.M.
Thackeray&rsquo;s <em>Vanity Fair</em> is useful for
underlining how one of the staples of the sentimental
novel&mdash;the training of the mind and "heart" that
Thackeray so mercilessly mocks as artificial&mdash;is
itself implicated in so many mid-nineteenth century
Americans&rsquo; expression of anxiety over female
novel-reading. In this context, Becky Sharp&rsquo;s
"naturalness" and her explicit rejection of books and
female self-improvement at once invite a
reconsideration of the naivet&eacute; and simplicity
critics have often assumed in their discussions of
American domestic fiction, while at the same time
drawing attention to the contentious debates over the
moral status of novels themselves and the kind of
cultural work they did.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I have chosen <em>Vanity Fair</em> as an example of
a popular British reprint during this period because
Thackeray&rsquo;s cynical manipulation of the
sentimental genre invites analysis of the
period&rsquo;s dominant historiography that posits a
literary landscape dominated by American sentimental
fiction. <em>Vanity Fair</em>&rsquo;s strong presence
in the American market invites the dissolution of the
monochromatic sentimentality that critics still too
often expect of American women&rsquo;s novels at
mid-century, while Thackeray&rsquo;s novel&rsquo;s
popularity in the U.S. provides an opportunity to
examine what critics, and presumably readers, valued
about novels and why. In other words, I use Becky Sharp
to approach the problem of how British reprints alter
the popular American literary market precisely because
she is such an overtly anti-sentimental character.
Becky raises the question of the place of feminine
individualism in literature, or, as Gillian Brown
writes, "the alignment of the individualistic self and
its representations with anti-sentimentalism" (Brown
136). The traditional identification in American
literary history of popular literature with a tame,
feminized domesticity, and of individualism and the
integrity of self with more "literary," masculine works
of fiction, is nicely spliced by a figure such as
Becky. Because she is so self-interested, a reading of
her in the American context invites an analysis of the
relation between her authenticity or "naturalness" as
represented by Thackeray and her status as a popular,
if reviled, female figure in a wider spectrum of
reading. In turn, the value of Thackeray&rsquo;s
narrative being perceived as "true to life" or
"realistic" by antebellum American critics is placed in
opposition to the troubled representation of
authenticity in American sentimental culture.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Put very simply, it is the struggles with natural
passion and raw impulses, and the training of the mind
and "heart," that is at the center of much of this
period&rsquo;s "sentimental" writing, just as the same
struggle with passions&mdash;in which the battle is
lost&mdash;predominates the widely read sensation and
subversive fiction that David Reynolds has identified
in <em>Beneath the American Renaissance</em>.
<em>Vanity Fair&rsquo;s</em> explicit rejection of
female self-improvement in this context invites a
reconsideration of the naivet&eacute; and simplicity
critics have often assumed in their discussions of
American domestic fiction. Indeed, sustaining the
construct of an enclosed body of "domestic" or
"sentimental" fiction that comprised the whole of
American women&rsquo;s reading has long since been
shown to be untenable. And yet, the idea that popular
female reading was quite explicitly defined in terms of
British reprints throughout the 1850s remains
untested.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Reprinted in the United States by Harper &amp;
Brothers in 1848, the first volume of <em>Vanity
Fair</em> was issued on July 29, with volume two on
August 19 of the same year. For this first American
edition, illustrated by the author, one hundred pounds
was probably paid for proofs. Later that year, Harper
issued a one-volume edition, which sold for $1 in paper
and $1.25 in cloth (Dzwonkoski 195). In the absence of
a copyright agreement with England, under the
period&rsquo;s "courtesy of the trade" agreements,
Harper&rsquo;s payment should have secured their sole
right to publish <em>Vanity Fair</em> in the American
market. As was frequently the case, this "courtesy" was
not entirely respected. In fact, even in the relatively
civilized publishing atmosphere of the late 1840s, it
did not take long for other editions of <em>Vanity
Fair</em> to appear, each priced at $1. The first is
advertised from the Cincinnati firm H.B. Pearson in
1854, and the other is from the New York publisher,
Bunnel and Price, available no later than 1854 (Tidball
7; Vose 124). In addition, the German firm Tauchnitz
did not adhere to what it regarded as an American
practical agreement, even though Tauchnitz did publish
its books in the United States. The three-volume
Tauchnitz edition of <em>Vanity Fair</em> was
advertised in the book industry trade paper of the day,
<em>The Publisher&rsquo;s Circular and Weekly
Gazette</em> in 1857 at 40 cents a volume, along with
the works of Dickens and Bront&euml;
(<em>Publisher&rsquo;s Circular</em> 27).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Harper&rsquo;s right to exclusive publication of
<em>Vanity Fair</em> was not maintained, and yet
Harper&rsquo;s market share of the reprint business was
high and, despite the presence of two or more small
competitors, it is apparent that Harper itself did a
brisk business in printing and reprinting <em>Vanity
Fair</em> throughout the 1850s, including multiple
printings dated 1848, 1857, and 1860 (<em>Union
Catalog</em> 512-3). This does <em>not</em> mean that
Harper only issued the novel in these years. Rather, it
means Harper issued the novel with a new title page in
these years, reusing the initial printing&rsquo;s 1848
title-page plate in subsequent printings for reissue
through 1857. It is impossible to say, therefore, how
many times Harper published <em>Vanity Fair</em> during
these years. <em>Vanity Fair</em> was issued again and
again by Harper over the course of the 1850s but
because the general dating practices of the period are
inconsistent, finding a complete count of either
various publishers&rsquo; editions or Harper copies of
<em>Vanity Fair</em> is not possible.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In the absence of absolute numbers, reconstructing
<em>Vanity Fair&rsquo;s</em> rank in the marketplace
argues for a brief analysis of that marketplace during
this period as well as an assessment of the
novel&rsquo;s critical and cultural impact in print.
The novel&rsquo;s sales in the United States arose in
no small part out of American readers&rsquo; long
dependence on British fiction, which in turn was in
part a result of market conditions.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Thackeray, whose fame as a novelist was made on both
sides of the Atlantic by <em>Vanity Fair</em>, did not
simply achieve fleeting recognition but became an
important cultural referent in a nation preoccupied
with propriety, sincerity, and the moral dangers
exemplified by Bunyan&rsquo;s and Thackeray&rsquo;s
<em>Vanity Fair</em>. High rates of literacy in the
United States compared to England helped to create a
healthy publishing industry that was largely dependent
on reprinting British books. As I have argued, this
fact forms the foundation of debates over the passage
of an international copyright law, with laborers&rsquo;
concerns, and concerns about sustaining the industry
from top to bottom, providing the most consistent and
compelling reasons for opposing passage of what might
seem (and certainly seemed to Dickens) to be a just and
fair law. But Thackeray and Dickens both benefited
enormously from the reprinting of their books in the
United States: they were paid for advance sheets,
rights to serial reproduction, and later their American
tours were money-making ventures.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As might be expected of such a widely read work,
<em>Vanity Fair</em> was frequently referenced and
reviewed, but it was given decidedly mixed notices from
critics. Not only was the novel noted in short and long
reviews when first published, it was discussed again
and again as critics surveyed Thackeray&rsquo;s work as
a whole during his lecture tours and compared it with
his subsequent novels, including <em>Pendennis</em>,
<em>The Virginians</em>, and <em>The Newcomes</em>
(Flamm 56-9). These often contradictory reviews
document the novel&rsquo;s visibility and presence in
the American market, which I will discuss at greater
length below, and they provide an opening into the
values and priorities of the era&rsquo;s reviewers.
While these values are certainly not identical to
readers&rsquo; values, some correspondence can be
claimed where dominant themes can be recognized and
shown to be widely shared. I want to underline two
points: first, the emphasis on and appreciation of
"realism" and second, the predominant interest in the
morality or immorality of Becky Sharp and her perceived
effect on readers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>These two points may seem disparate, but they are in
fact linked by the still somewhat tenuous positioning
of novels in the culture. Because morality is
frequently characterized by critics and commentators as
an intrinsic quality of a text that cannot be separated
from that text&rsquo;s social effects, these effects
are perceived as ineffective in the absence of
"realism." What I mean by this is what must be called
"literary" standards cannot be separated from moral
judgment. Given the still-contingent status of novels
as a legitimate form of culture, their perceived role
in shaping female morality and decorum, the positive
social effects of novel reading were linked to certain
standards of verisimilitude and were not seen to occur
at all in overwrought, implausible, or absurd
narratives. Realism, then, was cause for praise, as a
reviewer notes in an article titled "Novels of the
Season" in <em>The North American Review</em> (October
1848):</p>
<blockquote>
Of all the novels on our list, <em>Vanity Fair</em>
is the only one in which the author is content to
represent actual life. His page swarms with
personages whom we recognize at once as genuine. It
is also noticeable, that Thackeray alone preserves
himself from the illusions of misanthropy or
sentimentality, and though dealing with a host of
selfish and malicious characters, his book leaves no
impression that the world is past praying for.
(<em>North Amercan Review</em> 369)
</blockquote>
<p>In this formulation, morality and authenticity are
central to the literary&mdash;both insofar as the
entwined registers of its "use" for readers are
concerned as well as insofar as its more general
"value" for the culture is concerned. <em>Vanity
Fair</em> is understood to be more morally and socially
useful than the other novel under review because it
accurately represents characters and situations from
life, presumably making it possible for readers to
glean useful lessons from the text. As <em>The North
American Review&rsquo;s</em> critic notes, the realism
is accomplished without "misanthropy" or
"sentimentality"&mdash;each a form of "illusion" that
distorts reality.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The acceptance of Becky Sharp as a literary
character, and the widespread admiration of her in the
American press, is based in large part on
reviewers&rsquo; perceptions of her as a true or
accurate type; as George Curtis writes in a lengthy
discussion of <em>Vanity Fair</em> in his 1853 <em>The
Potiphar Papers</em>, "'to hold a mirror up to
Nature,&rsquo; is still the most potent method of
shaming sin and strengthening virtue" (Curtis 12).
Becky is not only appreciated for being true to a real
type of scheming female, but more importantly, her
whole persona is based on a certain kind of raw
authenticity that is esteemed for its truth value. As
the writer of <em>Harper&rsquo;s</em> "Easy Chair"
writes: "The 'ideal,' in the sense usually intended by
the word, is as foolish and unnatural in literature as
it is in art. The sharp-sighted and pure-minded artists
have long ago seen that the utmost reach of art is the
most rigorous obedience to nature."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Linking this laudable "obedience to nature" to
Becky, he proceeds to defend Thackeray against "many of
the gentle sex who have hitherto refused allegiance to
him on the ground that all his women were either fools
or knaves." As he writes of Becky, underlining her sins
and bad character as evidence of Thackeray&rsquo;s
affection for truly virtuous women: "no man could draw
Becky Sharp so dexterously who did not most exquisitely
conceive and reverence the opposite of that character"
(<em>Harper&rsquo;s</em> 840). Referring to
Thackeray&rsquo;s novel as "the best we have ever seen
from his pen," the reviewer for <em>The
Knickerbocker</em> (September 1848) writes a bit more
equivocally in a six page review:</p>
<blockquote>
One of the best drawn characters is that of REBECCA,
the scheming governess; sly, cunning, clever,
unprincipled, and a thorough 'woman of the
world,&rsquo; in the worst acceptation of the term.
Her career forms an admirable lesson, but we cannot
even indicate it. (<em>Knickerbocker</em> 249)
</blockquote>
<p>Here, <em>The Knickerbocker&rsquo;s</em> critic
playfully teases the reader with the problem of the
"admirable lesson" Becky indicates, while the
<em>Democratic Review</em>, in October 1848, gamely
embraces her and her wickedness, while noting that the
story is told "with the most marvelous richness of
lively detail, elegant phrases and humorous situation.
. . Clever, keen, pliant little 'Becky.&rsquo; What
though she is heartless, selfish, designing,
intriguing; we love her because she is talented,
energetic,&mdash;and successful" <em>(Democratic
Review</em> 379, 378). In a dissenting view, the critic
for <em>The Christian Examiner</em> intoned that "no
modern writer had done more to strip the very name of
woman all associations of moral beauty" than Thackeray
in <em>Vanity Fair</em> (Baym 105).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>For the most part reviewers responded not with
outrage or revulsion to <em>Vanity Fair</em>, but with
appreciation of the spirit and even of the cynical but
successful knavery of Thackeray&rsquo;s character. The
emphasis was frequently on Becky&rsquo;s success and
her wily manipulation of the characters and situations
in which she finds herself. Nor did the novel surprise
or offend these critics&rsquo; sensibilities (with the
one exception) as might be expected in an era, the
literary history of which is often characterized as
wholly dominated by gentle and sentimental American
domestic fiction. The writer for <em>North American
Review</em> (1848) applauds Thackeray&rsquo;s
willingness and ability to represent the breadth of
humanity, good and bad, while referring to Becky as
"the finest character in the whole novel. . . an
original personage, worthy to be called the
author&rsquo;s own, and as true to life as hypocrisy,
ability, and cunning can make her. . . the very
impersonation of talent, tact, and worldliness, and one
who works her way with a graceful and effective
impudence unparalleled among managing women" ("Novels"
369). That Becky Sharp did not offend, and was widely
admired for her wicked success, must be seen in the
context of a more accurate representation of the
literary marketplace; one flooded not only with the
sensation fiction Reynolds has so carefully documented
but also with reprints of British novels that were seen
as far more damaging to readers&rsquo; morals than was
Thackeray&rsquo;s ultimately moral purpose in
<em>Vanity Fair</em>. The writer for <em>The North
American Review</em>, in fact, singles out <em>Vanity
Fair</em> as an admirable work (not only socially or
morally, but in literary terms as well) from among
eight other British reprints reviewed in the same
article, including the Bront&euml;s&rsquo; <em><em>Jane
Eyre</em></em>, <em>Wuthering Heights</em>, and <em>The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall</em>, Lady Georgiana
Fullerton&rsquo;s <em>Grantley Manor</em>, Edward
Lytton Bulwer&rsquo;s <em>Harold, the Last of the
Saxton Kings</em>, and <em>Hawkstone</em>. While these
novels are by no means outrageous in the vein of Eugene
Sue or the early Bulwer, some of them stretched the
boundaries of propriety, as well as reality, in ways
that were objectionable to some reviewers, with
<em>Wuthering Heights</em> being the greatest offender
in this group ("Novels" 354-69).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Thackeray&rsquo;s representation of Becky and her
treachery is quite tame in comparison with either the
sensation fiction that purported to reform readers with
the demonstrated misdeeds of characters caught up in
nefarious vices. <em>Vanity Fair</em>, while containing
a representation of a morally repugnant character who
engages in some fairly explicit sexual misdeeds, did
not stand out&mdash;or rather, the representation of
Becky stood out as an example of well-developed
character in a novel with an ultimately moral purpose.
Thackeray&rsquo;s satire was generally recognized for
what it was. As Frederick Cozzens writes in his book of
social and literary criticism, <em>Prismatics</em>, in
1853: "Mr. Thackeray is one of the most genial and
amiable of men. But however brilliant his wit, it has
no warm, sunny side. He succeeds in creating very
detestable people in his novels, for whom one does not
feel the least sympathy. The satire, however, is
perfect" (232). Taking this understanding of
Thackeray&rsquo;s purpose, and parsing the definition
of satire is Curtis, the author of <em>The Potiphar
Papers</em>, who writes:</p>
<blockquote>
It is called a satire, but after much diligent
reading, we cannot discover the satire. A state of
society not at all superior to that of <em>Vanity
Fair</em> is not unknown to our experience; and,
unless scalding tears of sorrow, and the bitter
regret of a manly mind over the miserable spectacle
of artificiality, wasted powers, misdirected
energies, and lost opportunities, be satirical; we do
not find satire in that sad story. (11)
</blockquote>
<p>Like this critic, many understood <em>Vanity
Fair</em> and its representation of the foibles of
"society" as truth. While the greater truth of these
depictions only strengthens the satire, rather than
eliding it with sadness, the point remains that the
novel&rsquo;s moral purpose, recognized by many and
exemplified by Charlotte Bront&euml; as she dedicated
the second edition of <em><em>Jane Eyre</em></em> to
Thackeray and his role as "the first social regenerator
of the day"&mdash; a role recognized by many Americans
as well (36).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Vanity Fair&rsquo;s</em> reviews appeared in
publications that are best identified as part of the
general press and not as exclusively "lady&rsquo;s"
journals. These publications also reviewed the American
women&rsquo;s domestic fiction of the period, including
<em>The Wide, Wide, World</em>, <em><em>The
Lamplighter</em></em>, and <em><em>Uncle Tom&rsquo;s
Cabin</em></em>. <em>Vanity Fair</em> did not, in other
words, enter the American market in isolation&mdash;it
was judged side by side with American women&rsquo;s
domestic fiction, and in a market flooded with
sensation novels. Nor was it ignored or overlooked in
the predominantly feminine presses, including <em>The
Southern Literary Messenger</em>, <em>Godey&rsquo;s
Lady&rsquo;s Book</em>, and the <em>Literary
World</em>, all of which also commonly reviewed and ran
advertisements for American domestic fiction alongside
those for British reprints.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>While many of these reviews lack critical
analysis&mdash;they are composed in large part
according to conventions of the genre, of long excerpts
from the novel under review&mdash;they situate these
novels in a particular market; when <em>Vanity
Fair</em> was reviewed or noted by <em>The
Knickerbocker</em>, <em>The Democratic Review</em> or
<em>Godey&rsquo;s Lady&rsquo;s Book</em> and other
popular American originals were reviewed there as well
(as they were), we can place them in the same, or at
least in a very similar, literary culture, made up of
texts, publishers, books, and readers. While I do not
intend to reconstruct a general body of readers, or
their reception of <em>Vanity Fair</em> beyond the
select and certainly non-representative response of a
few, predominantly northeastern reviewers, I do want to
emphasize the significance of the fact that British
reprints, including <em>Vanity Fair</em>, <em><em>David
Copperfield</em></em>, and <em><em>Jane Eyre</em></em>,
existed alongside American domestic fiction and were
very much a part of the same, fluid literary market.
This means they were read by the same class of readers
that other critics including Nina Baym, Lora Romero,
Jane Tompkins, and Anne Douglas (to name a few of the
first to do so) have established as the primary
consumers of American sentimental fiction&mdash;white,
middle- and upper-class females, as well as by the men
that made up the presumed market for sensational
fiction. That is, these novels were reviewed and
discussed in the same magazines and newspapers, they
were published and sold alongside one another, and
while British reprints were often less expensive than
American originals, the advertisements for them, their
binding, and the quality and quantity of illustration
were comparable. Some critics have argued that the
sensation literature of the 1850s, the precursor to the
dime novel of the 1860s, was in fact the true popular
literature of the day and that the above sentimental
literature was genteel female reading, but I want to
argue that the boundary between these genres and forms
had not yet solidified by the 1850s. As the review
history indicates, British fiction, as far as the press
was concerned, was comparable to so-called "sensation"
and "sentimental" fiction&mdash;none of which existed
in its own market.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>By establishing <em>Vanity Fair&rsquo;s</em> full
participation in the literary market and culture of the
period I do not mean to imply that it was welcomed by
all segments of that culture, nor that there was one
unified literary culture at the time. The point I want
to make is that the borders between "genteel"
women&rsquo;s fiction, British reprints that fit into
this category, those that didn&rsquo;t, and American
originals not fit for "ladies," were constantly
shifting. These borders help to identify how British
reprints have for so long been overlooked in American
literary history, and in particular in the history of
women&rsquo;s fiction during this period. For it has
been primarily through the study of women&rsquo;s
nationally identified literary <em>production</em> that
critics have approached the popular fiction of this
period. In doing so, most critics have demarcated a
fairly rigid boundary around the texts that
<em>women</em> who were writing or living in the United
States produced, thereby creating a category of fiction
based on a specific kind of gendered, geographically
specific production. This category is useful in many
ways, but its limitations are revealed when this
somewhat arbitrary category of producers and their
goods become the object of the study of a group of
nationally identified (presumed) gendered consumers.
The once useful border around American gendered
producers then becomes too circumscribed, as by its
very definition it cannot accommodate fiction written
by non-American women, even if this fiction is equally,
if not more, important for the study of popular
consumption.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>From this perspective of consumers in a busy and
chaotic transatlantic print market, I want to use
<em>Vanity Fair</em> to focus on the shifting debates
over morality, realism and literary value and on the
kinds of changes these values underwent over the course
of the 1850s. In addition, I&rsquo;ll undertake a brief
analysis of what was considered appropriate for
antebellum American women to read and why, and begin to
talk about the predominantly British novels around
which debates over female reading circulated. How were
these novels aligned and/or misaligned with American
domestic/sentimental fiction&mdash;in other words, how
do these novels change the way we view the literary
history of the period?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The following passage underscores my point that it
is impossible, or at least irresponsible, to comprehend
female literary consumption in antebellum America
without including British reprints in the discussion.
Appearing in <em>Godey&rsquo;s</em> in 1847, just prior
to the peak of consumption and production of American
domestic fiction, the "Editor&rsquo;s Table" took up
the question of "Courses for Reading for Ladies," with
but three references to American authors. The remainder
of the column is taken up by advice to women on the
virtues and dangers of British novels:</p>
<blockquote>
Read all of Walter Scott&rsquo;s if you choose; and
[G.P.R.] James is as safe a friend as any
novel-loving young lady can find&mdash;none of his
novels need the <em>tabu</em>. . . . all the novels
by Mr. [Robert Plumer] Ward, and all by Charles
Dickens can be marked free. We wish we could say so
of all written by [Lytton] Bulwer and [Benjamin]
D&rsquo;Israli. In the perusal of these, a young lady
should consult her judicious friends. It is not wise
to give public prohibitions and yet there are cases
when the advice of a wise and delicate-minded friend
is of great advantage to a young lady in her reading.
(213)
</blockquote>
<p>Five short years later, in marked contrast to its
enthusiastic endorsement of fashionable historical
romances above, <em>Godey&rsquo;s</em> complained of
literature that is "chiefly framed for amusement."
Turning from the seeming innocence of romance to
fiction demonstrating a higher social and intellectual
utility, as well as a greater correspondence to
reality, in 1853 both <em>Godey&rsquo;s</em> and
<em>The North American Review</em> exhorted their
readers to more serious purpose in their reading. As
the writer for <em>Godey&rsquo;s</em> put it, "let the
fervor of intellectual pursuits be encouraged; but it
should be after knowledge, not excitement." Referring
to the staples of polite American female reading,
including Scott, Radcliffe, Burney, and Edgeworth, an
essayist for <em>The North American Review</em> writes
that "novels were not then supposed to express the
spirit of the age. Their aim was to please the reader.
. . The romance proper dealt only with an ideal" (105).
He goes on to demand that readers strive toward a more
elevated purpose in their reading, using Austen and
Bulwer as examples of frivolous goods, emphasizing
their lack of social and moral usefulness:</p>
<blockquote>
We laugh at the foibles or frown at meanness; perhaps
resolve to beware of the one and the other. So far,
well enough. But what is our feeling of the social
world thus exhibited? Is our love of kind increased?
Are the Christian desire and duty of remedying the
ills we see quickened by these pictures of prevalent
heartlessness and folly? (108)
</blockquote>
<p>These critics, in attempting to outline appropriate
reading for women in an age steeped in Christian
evangelical reform and an explosion of print that often
did not suit the period&rsquo;s moralistic impulses,
are addressing the period&rsquo;s popular fiction and
in doing so are almost exclusively discussing British
reprints. In this context <em>Vanity Fair</em> was seen
as a useful form of social satire with an ultimately
moral purpose in keeping with emergent American values
emphasizing simplicity, honesty, and the absence of
pretense.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The perceived moral purpose of novels was central to
shaping the emerging hierarchies defining various
fictional genres. And yet, as Reynolds argues, "the gap
between doctrinal social texts and entertaining
imaginative texts" narrowed during this period, with
the result that fluidity between genres was markedly
increased as the social purpose infiltrating many
novels became harder to distinguish from sermons or
religious tracts. Thus, what Reynolds refers to as
"sacrosanct themes" became a crucial element in
fiction, while at the same time, those themes were
invoked in a newly stylized version that called on "the
mimetic, earthly world of literary realism" (16). Thus
the emergent ideals of a more literary style combined,
in the American context, with the demand for a more
sophisticated morality underwritten by a "more serious
purpose." That is, expectations for both the purpose or
function of fiction as well as the style and devices
used to accomplish that aim changed, becoming at once
more "literary" and more didactic.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Vanity Fair</em> was widely understood in the
Anglo-American press to be both a moral and literary
accomplishment, with reviewers referring to
Thackeray&rsquo;s "entire freedom from mannerism and
affectation both in style and sentiment. . . His
effects are uniformly the effects of sound wholesome,
legitimate art; and we hardly need add that we are
never harrowed up with the physical horrors of the
Eugene Sue school in his writings, or that there are no
melodramatic villains to be found in them"
("Thackeray&rsquo;s Writings" 272). This admiration of
the "art" of Thackeray&rsquo;s work and what might be
termed its genteel simplicity was repeated in many of
the reviews. Often compared to Dickens and his level of
"pathos," appraisals of both authors were continually
caught up in addressing the morality of the
authors&rsquo; stories, their views on human nature,
and the ultimate effect of these tendencies on the
reader&mdash;that is, the "lesson" their texts offer.
The judgment of the moral value of a text was taken
quite seriously, with a complex understanding of
readers as serious consumers of narrative not taken in
by, or more importantly, not affected by, artificiality
either in prose, plot or character. As a reviewer
writes in October 1856 in <em>The North American
Review</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
Because the moral of a book is not written out in a
few pithy words on the last page, it does not follow
that the book has no moral. No faithful transcript of
human life and human passion can be clearly and
powerfully exhibited, without, of necessity,
containing a deep and searching moral, all the more
forcible to the thinking man because it is subtle and
beneath the surface. Is not Thackeray&rsquo;s
<em>Vanity Fair</em> a sermon of the most stringent
application? Its author holds a mirror to our hearts,
which reveals to each of us many a spring of action
that we blush for, many a littleness and weakness,
with much of worldliness and vanity, which we have
never before been forced fairly to acknowledge, even
to ourselves. We lay down the book, confessing, in
spite of ourselves, that it is a faithful likeness of
a large part of our human nature and this confession
is followed by a pang that is not always useless. . .
. Much self-knowledge may be attained, much healthful
humility promoted, by having, as it were, the picture
of our own hearts set forth before our astonished
eyes, touched by the hand of a skillful and fearless
master. ("Chapter" 349)
</blockquote>
<p><em>Vanity Fair</em> is admired not only for the
moral lesson it offers, but also for the subtlety with
which that lesson is imparted, and for the forcefulness
of it, the result of the "faithful likeness" or the
realism with which the "skillful and fearless master"
sets the lessons forth. This suggests that the emerging
divide between old and new was not parsed so much in
terms of sentimentality and realism; rather, the divide
is expressed on the one hand as a division between
texts that followed dated narrative formulas and those
that were able to move into a more sophisticated and
character-driven expression of the novel&rsquo;s
purpose; on the other hand, it is a divide between pure
"amusement" and the purposeful, yet sophisticated,
moral didacticism of the 1850s. As the same reviewer
writes in <em>The North American Review</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
The modern novel differs from the old-fashioned one
in so many points, that hardly any similarity
remains, save that which is implied and necessitated
by the realm to which they appertain, and the
allegiance which both owe to the imaginative faculty
of their creators. They differ, not only in choice
and arrangement of materials and agencies, but their
motive powers are totally unlike. The successful
novel of the present day is strictly a work of art,
amenable to all the laws of art. . . Artistic beauty
of style must accompany the creation, development,
and completion of the plot. Harmonious and dignified
expression must follow powerful conception in the
romance that would win and retain a strong hold upon
the public taste. ("Chapter" 348)
</blockquote>
<p>Comparing these works to the "days when Richardson,
Mrs. Radcliffe, and Miss Burney wrote romances which
set the literary coteries of England in a blaze," the
writer notes the "conventional ingredients" these
novelists relied upon for their fiction but which have
been supplanted by "the element of conversation. . . to
allow the characters to unfold their individuality
through the medium of their own expression." This
aesthetic of the literary (identified as a less
conventional telling of a story and by the absence of
stock incidents, "startling events," "accidents and
surprises," and "secrets and discoveries") is an
essential element in "good" fiction, and yet fiction of
all kinds is still positioned very much as an
instrument of moral and intellectual improvement. He
goes on to argue that, "The high requirements which
criticism has lately made, have placed the novel on an
elevated grade, not only as a composition, but as an
assistant in mental and moral culture" ("Chapter"
342).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A lengthy essay on <em>Vanity Fair</em> in <em>The
American Whig Review</em> (October 1848) addresses
realism and morality in a way that brings us, perhaps
surprisingly, to the connection between women, books,
morality and maternity, a set of terms crucial to both
domesticity and sentimentality, and one around which my
argument will frequently circulate. The reviewer,
having discussed Balzac&rsquo;s characters, writes that
"this mention of Balzac brings to mind a more serious
charge. . . more than once heard" against Thackeray:
"namely, that his sketches contain too many
disagreeable characters." The reviewer then
acknowledges: "a queer charge this to come from a
reading generation which swallows copious illustrated
editions of <em>Les Myst&egrave;res</em> and <em>Le
Juif</em>, and is lenient to the loathsome vulgarities
of <em>Wuthering Heights</em> and <em>Wildfell
Hall</em> [<em>sic</em>]." The critic then goes on to
defend Thackeray&rsquo;s use of such "scamps,
profligates, and hypocrites;" these characters, the
reviewer claims, are introduced "to show them up and
put us on our guard against them. . . we hate them, and
he hates them too. And if he ever does bestow
attractive traits on his rogues, it is to expose the
worthlessness and emptiness of some things which are to
the world attractive&mdash;to show that the good things
of <em>Vanity Fair</em> are not good per se, but may be
coincident with much depravity" (<em>American Whig
Review</em> 422-3). In other words, the complexity of
Thackeray&rsquo;s text works to subtly and more
effectively convey the novel&rsquo;s moral content. The
assumption is that readers, particularly female
readers, will identify with the text. This is the mode
of reading I have identified with Dickens and which is
linked to domesticity and its ideological shaping of
gender insofar as women were assumed to have greater
capacity for empathy and thus tended to be more
influenced by their reading. The very qualities that
made women maternal by nature also made them, by
nature, more vulnerable and deeply invested consumers
of fiction.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As Kate Flint argues, in the Victorian era
"maternity was no longer regarded, in relation to
women&rsquo;s reading, simply as a function which
ensured close social guiding of one&rsquo;s offspring."
Rather, she argues, it was "the ability to venture with
sympathetic identification into the lives of others"
that guaranteed "women&rsquo;s susceptibility to
identifactory modes of reading" (31). This, of course,
was constructed as a "natural" result of the female
physiological makeup, including the reproductive
capacity and the female brain. In turn, the deep
identification with the text necessary to its
"influence" is dependent upon a certain degree of
realism to be effective. Thus one of the most
influential books of the decade, <em>The Wide, Wide
World</em>, was admired for its realism, a fact that
may surprise many readers of the novel insofar as
realism is generally posed in opposition to
sentimentality. Warner&rsquo;s novel was viewed by many
critics as both artful (with well-developed characters,
scenes and plot) and at the same time true to its moral
and religious purpose, neither of which were seen to be
in conflict. The novel&rsquo;s status as the
sentimental novel <em>par excellence</em> in the
literary history of the period is a categorical
position imposed on the novel <em>later</em> and not
one that the novel occupied during the 1850s.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>To position Warner&rsquo;s and Thackeray&rsquo;s
novels in a literary market together, and to see them
as sharing readers, we need not recast these texts nor
create unbridgeable divides between them; rather, we
must grant the readers of the period a measure of
sophistication in terms of their literary tastes. We
must also give credit to these readers&rsquo; ability
to attain some distance and perspective on the tears
and sentiment they consumed, based again on their
consumption of a satirical novel like <em>Vanity
Fair</em>. Beyond the superabundance of tears, there is
very little in common between Thackeray&rsquo;s Amelia
Sedley and Warner&rsquo;s Ellen Montgomery, much less
between his Becky and her Ellen; the books, however,
have a serious didactic purpose (although not the same
purpose) and each carries out its mission with prose
that is attentive to the representation of the "real"
in the interests of social and moral improvement. And
while Thackeray&rsquo;s parody engages the perfect
heroines of old, including those idols of perfection so
popularized in England and America by Scott and Cooper,
Warner&rsquo;s certainly owes a great deal to their
sisters, the searching paragons of moral and social
perfection exemplified in the novels of Burney and
Edgeworth.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The overwhelming popularity of <em>Vanity Fair</em>,
<em>The Wide, Wide World</em>, <em>David
Copperfield</em>, <em>Jane Eyre</em>, and <em>The
Lamplighter</em> all provide opportunities to perceive
the way the taste for popular literature moved toward a
mode of purposeful reform (an exhortation applied to
both writers and readers) in the 1850s, while at the
same time becoming more sophisticated and less
formulaic in style, plot, and character. To pursue this
point further, Becky Sharp and her relation to
domesticity and self-improvement provides some insight
into the values underlying the shift that the reviewers
above identify. I will situate <em>Vanity Fair</em>,
with its ambiguous "heroine," as a text that throws
into relief many of the cultural and social imperatives
exemplified by female protagonists as represented by
Warner in <em>The Wide, Wide World</em> and by Maria
Cummins in her 1854 novel <em>The
Lamplighter</em>&mdash;two novels that, aside from
Stowe&rsquo;s <em>Uncle Tom&rsquo;s Cabin</em> and
Bront&euml;&rsquo;s <em>Jane Eyre</em>, were the most
popular novels of the decade.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Vanity Fair</em> is a moral book because it is a
successful satire; indeed, it could scarcely be read
any other way given how often the novel&rsquo;s
narrator tips his hand and laughs at the pretensions
and conventions of the "sentimental" and "ever so
stupid" novels he parodies. As the reviewer for <em>The
United States Democratic Review</em> writes in October
1848: "<em>Vanity Fair</em> is the world, and through
its booths and busy places of pleasure and sorrow, the
author leads the reader with Sentiment on one arm and
Satire on the other." As this comment suggests, the
American press had no trouble joining Thackeray&rsquo;s
reverie, since the kinds of novels he mocks had long
been staples of American reading and are included in a
long list of British fiction read in the United States.
Included in these perennial Anglo-American favorites
are in fact many of the novels that polite society and
genteel lady&rsquo;s magazines had long recommended
women and girls read, including Edgeworth&rsquo;s
<em>Belinda</em>, Fanny Burney&rsquo;s
<em>Evelina</em>, Jane Austen&rsquo;s novels, and the
works of Susan Ferrier. American domestic fiction, of
course, also owes a great deal to these novels insofar
as they established the "sentimental" genre as the
female coming-of-age tale, a legacy that shaped both
writers&rsquo; and readers&rsquo; expectations of the
novel as a form meant, at least in part, for amusement.
While the American works distinguish themselves in many
ways in their treatment of race and class, they share a
preoccupation with the British model in their treatment
of emotion and intellect (or sense and sensibility)
that is expressed through the representation of the
female protagonists as sensitive, highly passionate and
in need of training in the arts of self-control and
reason. This is, of course, the novel&rsquo;s British
inheritance dating back at least to Richardson&rsquo;s
<em>Pamela</em>, the history of which is discussed
fully by Nancy Armstrong and Kate Flint in their
respective histories of the novel and of reading in
Britain.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Thackeray is not immune to the legacy of this
formula, and yet he cunningly situates his text in such
a way that it fits neatly into, while retaining some
distance from, its narrative demands. From
Amelia&rsquo;s sweetness, tears, and generosity
(however mocked) to Becky&rsquo;s status as a penniless
orphan, from the narrative structure that ultimately
leads to its logical end (the marriage of Amelia and
Major Dobbin, and Becky&rsquo;s second marriage) to the
novel&rsquo;s perverse preoccupation with Becky&rsquo;s
natural instincts, Thackeray retains many of the shared
conventions of the sentimental novel while at the same
time explicitly undermining them through the narrative
voice. Most notably, Becky is not improved, nor does
she wish to be. She openly engages in behavior that
would make her repugnant according to any measure of
idealized femininity of the period, which valued
purity, benevolence and emotional self-control above
all. Thackeray does not shy away from making a mockery
of these traits in Becky, just as he does not hesitate
to represent Amelia as a bald caricature of the insipid
sentimental heroine. As an 1848 reviewer in <em>The
Living Age</em> writes, one of Thackeray&rsquo;s women
"is without a heart, the other is without a head"
(413). Another critic, writing the same year for
<em>The Democratic Review</em>, sees this tension
between sentiment and satire in "these two women of
opposite disposition" as the "woof and web of the
story; all the rest is only nap, but nap of a most
excellent quality" (378).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Because Thackeray deploys the staples of
sentimentality so self-consciously, <em>Vanity
Fair</em> is useful in reframing American domestic
fiction and its complex situation in a mixed and
chaotic print culture. In turn, the text provides
insight into the preoccupation with purposeful and not
merely frivolous novel reading by revealing how
knowledge and sentimentality are entwined in the
popular fiction of the period. By placing <em>Vanity
Fair</em> in the body of American domestic fiction, we
disrupt the isolation many critics have depended on in
viewing American fiction as a self-enclosed universe,
one that was either reflective of, or posed in
opposition to, the real lives, work, and thoughts of
American female readers. As Jane Tompkins famously
argues, "the tears and prayers of sentimental heroines"
were compelling to readers "not because they
didn&rsquo;t know what good fiction was, nor because
their notions about human life were naive and
superficial, but because the 'order of things&rsquo; to
which both readers and fictions belonged was itself
structured by such narratives." While Tompkins is
certainly correct in postulating a mid-century culture
permeated by the reform movement and religious piety, I
think it is a mistake to view the fiction itself or its
readers as existing in such a vacuum. The popularity of
<em>Vanity Fair</em> undermines the kind of
naivet&eacute; Tompkins&rsquo;s claim depends on; it
suggests that the need to understand the readers of
domestic fiction as sophisticated consumers of a
diverse array of narrative styles with varying didactic
purposes.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As Reynolds and others have demonstrated, the reform
impulse was expressed not only as sentimentality, but
also as sensation. <em>Vanity Fair</em> bridges these
two seemingly opposed modes of expression, or genres.
By exploiting the period&rsquo;s sentimental novels in
a way that suggests a far more complex "order of
things" than Tompkins would have, <em>Vanity Fair</em>
may be seen as at once sentimental and sensational. And
while <em>The Wide, Wide World</em> certainly fits the
conventional notion of reform writing insofar as it
shows the path to goodness through examples of the
heroine&rsquo;s internal mastery of self and soul, not
all so-called sentimental writing did so. <em>Uncle
Tom&rsquo;s Cabin</em>, and the writing of E.D.E.N.
Southworth and Charles Dickens, to name just three
examples, frequently fall into the sentimental and the
subversive genres, showing the consequences of various
vices in graphic and sensational language, while at the
same time enacting maudlin scenes replete with tears.
This implicates the reader in scenes of sympathy in a
particularly intimate manner. Tompkins states that she
does not view these readers as being "naive"&mdash;that
the "order of things" was structured by "real" and
fictional narratives that reinforced a sentimental
world-view. I want to argue that by reading into the
period&rsquo;s domestic fiction the satirical narrative
<em>Vanity Fair</em> offers, the solidity of this order
and the narratives that comprised it are both
compromised and revealed to be working in unison with
an assumption central to readers of <em>Vanity
Fair</em>: cynicism. American popular novels (many of
them "sentimental") must be viewed through a far more
knowing, self-conscious lens than has been assumed as
the cynicism of <em>Vanity Fair</em>&rsquo;s narrator
exposes some of the more vulnerable lines beneath the
seemingly enclosed body of American domestic fiction.
Becky&rsquo;s character inverts many of the most
essential qualities of the female protagonist, while
reinforcing the centrality of class and market
relations as determining factors in the
protagonist&rsquo;s destiny. A deeply invested mode of
reading is elicited by these texts, but the depth and
emotion involved in this mode does not make it
unknowing or innocent.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I want to focus now on Becky&rsquo;s temper and her
mis/management of it as something that forcefully
distinguishes <em>Vanity Fair</em> from its British and
American competitors including <em>David
Copperfield</em>, <em>The Wide, Wide World</em>,
<em>The Lamplighter</em>, <em>Jane Eyre</em>, and other
British and American popular novels. These are all
novels preoccupied with learning and, most centrally,
with learning to control the passions through the use
of books&mdash;or through the practices of writing, and
reading. Becky&rsquo;s rejection of this model of
self-improvement helps to reframe the narrative
boundaries defining Anglo-American popular novels of
the period. Through her refusal to tame either her
passionate nature or her own self-interest Becky
remains, throughout the novel, un-domesticated. As Amy
Kaplan notes, we should think of "domesticity not as a
static condition but as the process of domestication,
which entails conquering and taming the wild, the
natural, and the alien." <em>Vanity Fair</em> suggests
that domestication fails Becky, that she is irrevocably
"wild, natural, and alien"&mdash;"this rebel, this
monster, this serpent, this firebrand" is never tame
(52). Unlike <em>David Copperfield</em>, she cannot put
aside the self-interest born of her early poverty.
<em>Vanity Fair</em> not only takes place outside of
the domestic in the sense that the novel does not
locate its emotional center in or around a particular
house, but its main character explicitly rejects the
self-improvement necessary to domestication, a
resistance that places Becky, as a white woman in
genteel society, in a somewhat ambiguous relation to
her gender.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Becky&rsquo;s resistance to domestication begins in
the novel&rsquo;s opening scene, when we see how very
mistaken "honest," "good natured" Jemima is when she
slips a copy of the revered <em>Johnson&rsquo;s
Dictionary</em> to Becky upon her departure from Miss
Pinkerton&rsquo;s School, certain that Miss Becky "will
be miserable if she don&rsquo;t get one" (41). Not only
does Becky not value the book, she is repelled by it,
and in fine comic fashion, "just as the coach drove
off, Miss Sharp put her face out of the window, and
actually flung the book back into the garden" (45). It
is not only her rejection of <em>a</em> book, but of
<em>this</em> book in particular, which in 1830s and
1840s England was a proud testament to the power of
words and to the knowledge necessary to their proper
use. Becky doesn&rsquo;t want that knowledge, and she
violently rejects the civilizing strictures&mdash;pomp,
pity, and education&mdash;it represents. As Becky
states bluntly to Amelia, "Revenge may be wicked, but
it&rsquo;s natural"&mdash;and natural is precisely what
Becky is and remains throughout the text (47). In
sticking her face out the window, she exposes herself,
barefaced as it were, not only to expose her act and
its result, but to place her naked face there alongside
the book as it flies through the air in a sort of open
declaration of her brazen and unfeminine character.
What is crucial about this scene is not that Becky
would so rudely fling the book (she does much worse),
nor that she is unrepentant about it. Becky&rsquo;s
behavior is outrageous because the credo she announces
never changes&mdash;she is content to be
<em>natural</em>. She has no interest in or use for
education nor, as I will argue, for moral or
intellectual reform of any kind. She is to be taken as
is, and no bonnet or head-scarf is called for to cover
or to shield (herself or others) from her actions.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Becky&rsquo;s refusal of <em>Johnson&rsquo;s
Dictionary</em> is a refusal that reverberates as she
demonstrates that her natural instincts serve her
self-interest very nicely. Having made use of Miss
Pinkerton&rsquo;s school where she was "bound over as
an articled pupil" because she could be "useful," and
not to gain an education there, she is moved along when
she becomes unmanageable and put to work as a
governess, again, selling her skills in exchange for
access to genteel society and, of course, money (49).
Unlike the eminently improvable Amelia, or the anxious
and ambitious type that includes Ellen of <em>The Wide,
Wide World</em> and Gerty of <em>The Lamplighter</em>,
Becky neither accepts nor needs instruction, except
perhaps in the finer points of upper-class etiquette
and speech&mdash;skills she gathers effortlessly: "that
in a fortnight, and after three dinners in general
society, this young woman had got up the genteel jargon
so well, that a native could not speak it better; and
it was only from her French being so good, that you
could know she was not a born woman of fashion" (342).
While Thackeray notes condescendingly that Becky "went
through the little course of study which was considered
necessary for ladies in those days," beyond this
obligatory bit virtually all of what she knows is
innately hers (51). The American heroines Ellen and
Gerty, on the other hand, are desperate to learn and go
to great lengths and make significant sacrifices of
time and energy to learn, with French being just one
example of the staple accomplishments the American
novels take up, the same Thackeray mocks. As Ellen in
<em>The Wide, Wide World</em> confesses, "I determined
I would try to study myself. . . . French I can do
nothing at all with, and that is what I wanted to learn
most of all." Gerty, too, "conceived a strong desire to
learn French," and proceeds to demonstrate "a wonderful
determination for doing so." In contrast to the
American heroines&rsquo;s commanding self-discipline
and dutiful drive to learn French (not by accident a
necessary accomplishment for a "lady" in genteel
society), it is simply Becky&rsquo;s "mother-tongue."
And while Becky does practice her music "incessantly"
at Miss Pinkerton&rsquo;s, it is a labor which says
more about the expression of her passionate nature than
it does about her desire to improve her skills.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The representation of this proper feminine model,
and its relevance to understanding how Becky&rsquo;s
shocking "natural" behavior plays into this tradition,
can best be viewed through one of the central
conventions of the period&rsquo;s fiction&mdash;that of
the motherless child. As the critic Carolyn Dever
convincingly argues in <em>Death of the Mother</em>,
the absence of the mother in Victorian fiction is a
prerequisite for re/forming the <em>ideal</em> mother.
In each of the novels I discuss, the protagonist is (at
least initially) an orphan, a formulation which enables
the ambiguity necessary to sustaining the ideal of a
classless society (the orphans&rsquo; origins are never
fully known, or are revealed at the end of the novel).
With the notable exception of <em>Vanity Fair</em>, the
void this absence creates is filled in each case with
two linked substitutes, reading/books and the idealized
maternal figure. The surrogate maternal characters,
Emily in <em>The Lamplighter</em> and Alice in <em>The
Wide, Wide World</em>, are themselves motherless, in
effect doubling the effective absence and its
representational possibilities. No better way could be
contrived of representing the possibilities inherent in
the threatened sacred feminine than through following
the moral, intellectual and religious development of
these lost children and their doubles. And while
poverty and injustice are heaped upon the orphans, they
are represented as spirited and capable in their
struggle to master their passions. As Ellen confesses
tearfully to Alice in one of their first meetings: "
The worst is,&mdash;oh the worst is&mdash;that I
meant&mdash;I meant to be a good child, and I have been
I have been worse than ever I was in my life before. I
have been passionate and cross, and bad feelings keep
coming, and I know it&rsquo;s wrong, and it makes me
miserable" (151). In turn, Gerty, of <em>The
Lamplighter</em> confesses to her blind guide Emily on
their first meeting (in a church, no less), "But I
an&rsquo;t good...I&rsquo;m real bad!" (66). For, like
Ellen, her passions "once excited...were always
extreme" (148), although she badly wants to be "good."
Through the representation of the good mother/orphan
and her unfailing guidance of the passionate
child/orphan (Emily and Gerty in <em>The
Lamplighter</em>, Alice and Ellen in <em>The Wide, Wide
World</em>) these novels repeat and reinforce the
necessity and possibility of <em>learning</em> to be
(domesticated) women. Of Becky we are told, "she never
had been a girl; she had been a woman since she was
eight years old," which means not just that she is
knowledgeable about the world, but more importantly,
that she is sexually compromised. Thackeray indicates
as much with his shadowy description of her history
with Mr. Crisp in Chapter Two, when he writes knowingly
of her outlook in leaving school and embarking on a
visit with Amelia&rsquo;s family that "in all events,
if Rebecca was not beginning the world, she was
beginning it over again" (49, 53).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>For Gerty and Ellen the process of becoming their
guiding maternal ideal (Emily or Alice) is a great
portion of the story the novel tells. As each learns to
discipline her body and mind by decoding the necessary
lessons for performing genteel womanly behavior, the
reading these girls do and that their surrogate mothers
give them access to is what fully transforms them. The
paradox generated by the values circulating around
sincere behavior and the learning of authenticity in
antebellum American culture provides insight into the
American novels&rsquo;s preoccupation with learning and
reform as exemplified by these characters. The partial
resolution of this paradox by mid-century enables us to
better understand the central place the idealized
heroine of <em>The Wide, Wide World</em> holds in
American domestic fiction, and how her sentimentality
can be understood without creating an inapproachable
divide between Warner&rsquo;s novel (and others like
it, including Cummins&rsquo;s) and other British
reprints, including <em>Jane Eyre</em> and <em>Vanity
Fair</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The standard version of this period&rsquo;s history
is that the preoccupation with education that is
characteristic of the age may in part be explained by
social and economic change during the Jacksonian Era
that eroded established means of identifying status,
class and identity. As many historians have argued, in
their absence a crisis of confidence arose, resulting
in a flood of instructions for American men and women.
"Conduct guides," whose purpose was to instruct
Americans in how to behave&mdash;including how to
dress, walk, mourn, worship, eat, and
speak&mdash;flooded the market beginning in the 1830s
and continued to appear in great numbers through the
1850s. I quibble with this analysis only insofar as
conduct guides did not spring out of nowhere, nor did
they disappear after 1860. They were published in great
numbers throughout the nineteenth century and beyond
and, as Nancy Armstrong has argued convincingly in her
study of the British novel, <em>Desire and Domestic
Fiction</em>, their origins may be traced to
Richardson&rsquo;s <em>Pamela</em> (1740). Virtually
every period in American history may be characterized
as containing great economic and social upheaval. The
1850s are no exception, and perhaps even merit some
special consideration on the grounds that the nation
did in fact go through fairly radical social, political
and economic upheaval on the eve of the Civil War as
well as during the crash of 1857. Thus, while Americans
experienced great economic and social change during
this period, it is the way these anxieties were
manifested&mdash;how they were expressed within the
writing of the period&mdash;that concerns me.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What is compelling about the proliferation of
conduct guides during this period is how, somewhat
paradoxically, they were aimed at instructing readers
in the art of being sincere. As Karen Haltunnen argues
in <em>Confidence Men and Painted Women</em>, the
anxiety over social and economic anomie was resolving
itself by mid-century as Americans became more
comfortable with the manners and rituals that marked
genteel, middle-class conduct; that is, they became
more secure in the idea that proper manners, dress and
conduct <em>represented</em> their sincerity (rather
than hiding it), and guarded them against what
continued to be their greatest fear, the hypocrite or
the masked upstart (197). Warner&rsquo;s representation
of the ideal feminine emphasize how Ellen&rsquo;s piety
is manifested <em>internally</em>, a formula for
politeness echoed by an advice manual of the period
which advised that "true politeness has its foundation
in benevolence. . . It is not confined to mere exterior
behavior . . . it proceeds from the heart" (<em>Manual
of Politeness</em> 7). This internal sense, however, is
repeatedly linked to a morality that performs itself
through deeds and actions while at the same time
arising out of that performance. As Kathryn Sklar
argues, a shift toward an emphasis on outward
manifestations of piety and morality took place during
this period that "was congruent with an increasingly
democratic and individualized ethos." As behavior was
valued over the psychological state of a "joyous love
to God," conduct became crucially important. This shift
changed, Sklar argues, "what had theoretically been
merely superficial behavioral modes into rigid moral
determinants. . . . Sexually differentiated definitions
of morality were thereby heightened, since so-called
<em>natural</em> and unnatural behavior could now be
equated with the moral and immoral" (83). We can then
explain how natural characteristics or the
"undomesticated," including blacks and non-assimilated
immigrants, were linked to immorality by examining more
closely some of the origins of domesticity.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As Kathleen McHugh asks in her <em>American
Domesticity</em>: "What have slavery, suffrage, and
citizenship to do with domesticity? In the period
between 1787 and 1840, the rise of the cult of
domesticity coincided almost exactly with the fight for
universal white manhood suffrage." Over the course of
this fight, she argues, "the criterion for the
franchise shifted from exclusions based on unequal
distribution of property to exclusions that legally
constituted identity itself as the premise for
inequality" (39). One of the consequences of this shift
toward a politics of identity-based citizenship (rather
than class- or property-based) was "the transformation
of domestic property relations." As McHugh argues, this
transformation affirmed the private sphere as "domestic
discourses formulated and celebrated the value of
private property or the domicile as precisely
dematerialized and idealized" (40). Connecting these
discourses back to the natural and consequently back to
Becky Sharp, we can see how McHugh&rsquo;s argument
helps to explain the connections between feminine
identity and property and in turn how Becky&rsquo;s
need for property and the subjectivity that is
underwritten by that property. As Becky herself
famously acknowledges, in a tone reminiscent of Austen:
"It isn&rsquo;t difficult to be a country
gentleman&rsquo;s wife. . . I think I could be a good
woman if I had five thousand a year" (495).
Thackeray&rsquo;s narrator is unapologetic about the
link between being a "good woman" and possessing
property, with Becky&rsquo;s quest for riches, social
stature and sexual purity underwritten by the
narrator&rsquo;s comment that "who knows but Rebecca
was right in her speculations&mdash;and that it was
only a question of money and fortune that made the
difference between her and an honest woman" (496).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>External manifestations of piety and morality gained
in importance during this period in part because
Americans were able to consolidate their construction
of "natural" behavior through the articulation of,
paradoxically, unpretentious manners while
distinguishing those "natural" manners from "unnatural"
behavior. In turn, the more rigid requirements for
feminine gender performance was linked to the evolving
importance of the private sphere and the construct of
domesticity. And while England was not undergoing an
identical crisis, the antecedents for and the
intellectual foundation of the crisis are shared. What,
I think, distinguishes the two at this point is the
American drive toward nationalism and its explicit
identification of simplicity as "American." This meant
that in food, dress, and manners Americans began to
desire to express and distinguish themselves&mdash;as
Americans. This is not to say that the slightly
conflicted Anglophilia that I would argue is a
characteristic of the period did not exist. It is to
say that Americans were beginning, for a variety of
reasons, not the least of which was the impending fight
over a united nation, to see themselves as separate,
and as embodiments of new and simpler values. When
Thackeray has a bit of fun with the construct of the
"artless" woman, it is a construct that perhaps
resonated even more strongly on the American side of
the Atlantic. The feared interloper, according to
<em>Vanity Fair</em>&rsquo;s narrator, is not far
removed from what the revered figure represented in the
American domestic novel. As Thackeray&rsquo;s narrator
somewhat wickedly warns:</p>
<blockquote>
The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say)
are hypocrites. We don&rsquo;t know how much they
hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem
most artless and confidential: how often those frank
smiles they wear so easily, are traps to elude or
disarm&mdash;I don&rsquo;t mean in your mere
coquettes, but your domestic models, paragons of
female virtue. (210-1)
</blockquote>
<p>The cynicism of this view of the polished woman
contrasts starkly with the American novel&rsquo;s
unerring faith in the true woman&rsquo;s use of manners
as a means of expressing authentic feeling. Indeed, it
might be read as a scathing indictment of
America&rsquo;s polite but deeply hypocritical white
women&rsquo;s culture on the eve of war. Americans, I
want to suggest, clung to the idea that actions
(manners) expressed feelings (the source of truth). As
Gerty in <em>The Lamplighter</em> demonstrates, perfect
manners could not be separated from genuine emotion.
The young and impressionable Fanny, when forced to tell
Gerty&rsquo;s rule for learning politeness, responds
that her advice "was the same my music-master gave me
last winter" when she asked him how she should "learn
to play with expression." The answer he gave and which
Gerty&rsquo;s recommends was "You must cultivate your
<em>heart</em>, Miss Bruce; you must cultivate your
<em>heart</em>" (240-1). Thus while Cummins represents
good manners as the result of genuine feeling,
Thackeray represents them as pure artifice&mdash;as a
part of the theater of society. Which is not to say
that Becky&rsquo;s manners were lacking&mdash;in fact,
Becky&rsquo;s "manners were fine, and her air
<em>distingu&eacute;</em>" (342). Clearly, however,
Becky&rsquo;s manners are precisely that, a means
(access and acceptance) to an end (money, a husband) in
genteel society&mdash;their honesty more closely
matches England&rsquo;s treatment of race, whereas the
American model seems to cling to a justification that
manners might cover for hypocrisy.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Warner repeatedly engages the question of manners in
<em>The Wide, Wide World</em>, with Ellen&rsquo;s and
others&rsquo; manners discussed throughout the novel as
markers of class, nation and racial identification. The
following discussion gives some indication of this:</p>
<blockquote>
"She is a fascinating child," said Mrs. Gillespsie.
"I cannot comprehend where she gets the manner she
has. I never saw such a perfectly polite child; and
there she has been for months with nobody to speak to
her but two gentlemen and the servants. It is natural
to her, I suppose; she can have nobody to teach her."
(475)
</blockquote>
<p>Warner&rsquo;s emphasis on Ellen&rsquo;s innate
goodness is something of a paradox. While she shows
that Ellen is passionate, and that those passions must
be tamed and controlled through submission to God, she
is also careful to demonstrate that Ellen is inherently
"good" or unusually pious by nature. What Thackeray
represents in Amelia as so much foolish
falsehood&mdash;including the maudlin scenes that
characterize sentimentality&mdash;are, paradoxically,
in the American novels, represented as a manifestation
of <em>authentic feeling</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Contextualizing this split between the
Thackeray&rsquo;s cynicism and the American
novelists&rsquo; more naive values requires delving
deeper into the logic of sentimentality, and how it
works within all three novels to subsume social and
racial difference behind the already racialized and
gendered enclave of the private middle-class
home&mdash;the sanctuary of the white, middle-class
woman. Indeed, as Shirley Samuels has argued, by
resolving public difficulty within the private sphere,
domestic sentimentalism in the American novels at once
erased unresolvable differences and ignored them. In
these texts, a specifically racialized class status is
ostensibly secured by the knowledge of a set of rules
that could be learned by anyone, and yet which are in
effect a set of codes that enable the means of
identification necessary to exclusion. At the center of
this code, or deeply embedded within the logic of
sentimentality, is the work it does in building and
maintaining the boundaries defining of gender. Becky
Sharp, because she is represented as the antithesis of
the sentimental heroine, provides a striking example of
the contours of gender. Because she is
anti-sentimental, the result is the representation of
an ambiguously gendered character.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In fact I&rsquo;d like to go further and suggest
that Becky is coded masculine, identified as she is
with the marketplace and with men throughout <em>Vanity
Fair</em>. "She had never mingled in the society of
women," Thackeray writes early in his description of
her, a situation that might in part explain what he
describes as "her hostility to her kind" (50, 48).
Extending her quasi-masculinity and its consequences
further, into the marketplace, I see her performing as
a commodity in the text as she is repeatedly exchanged
by (exchanges herself with) men and women, gathering
use-value without engaging in the labor of
self-improvement, becoming more and more expensive as
she moves up the marriage market until she finally
oversteps the line of propriety in her quest for
greater riches and status, thus ultimately devaluing
herself. Most importantly, Becky&rsquo;s value (as a
subject, as a woman) is naturalized as an exchange
value since one might argue that the most feminine
behavior in the marriage market&mdash;being a
commodity&mdash;is precisely what women are expected to
do. The difference is that Becky understands herself
and her relation to the world in commodity terms (she
is for sale to Miss Pinkerton and then to the right
husband, for the right price), and her efforts at
self-promotion amount to a fairly successful marketing
of her own assets.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I see Becky&rsquo;s status as a commodity, combined
with Thackeray&rsquo;s representation of her as natural
and his repeated emphasis on her as anti-domestic, as a
set of conditions that by coding her masculine invert
many of the key assumptions sustaining the sentimental
novel. The text, through Becky, subverts domesticity
and its basic values by representing them as so much
falsehood, so much pretense; and yet, the text&rsquo;s
effort to undermine the tired genre goes much further,
exposing the artificiality of white femininity itself.
Thackeray, by coding Becky as masculine and yet
representing her as a woman, enables her to enact, in
an extreme form, the basic preoccupation with natural
passions so evident in the period&rsquo;s popular
fiction. In other words, Becky is an expression of what
Reynolds identifies as the subversive impulse that
floods the sensation fiction of the period&mdash;that
is, she embodies the shocking human passions and their
untrained expression that is at the core of this crude
mode of reform writing, an expression that embodies
masculinity.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Thackeray&rsquo;s novel thus may be seen to work in
concert with American domestic fiction, but the novel
does so in a way that draws its readers&rsquo;
attention to sentimentality&rsquo;s central
pretensions. For it is not ultimately learning and
diligence, it is not spiritual and moral reform that
makes womanly virtue possible; rather, these are
revealed as the pretensions hiding the essential
difference between classes&mdash;and it is ultimately
the very American obsession with race that is
underscored as the real difference between women. To be
"natural," then, had a dual and somewhat contradictory
meaning since it simultaneously signaled effortless,
authentic performance of the "self" while also
indicating an undesirable absence of cultivation and
domestication most damningly and shockingly linked to
female sexual passion which is in turn coded black.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In this formulation we can see that
Thackeray&rsquo;s representation of Becky and her
passionate, fiery and indeed often uncontrollable
nature plays on the divide in American popular fiction
between the sentimental and sensational modes. For
while impulsiveness is represented in both genres as a
great evil to be conquered (although it is often not
conquered in the sensation novels), it is the play of
race and gender that complicates the divide. For white
female protagonists, the necessity of concealing and
ultimately ridding the self of all uncontrolled desires
and impulses is at the center of the drive toward
achieving the virtue necessary to becoming a genteel
wife&mdash;the end that is in store for virtually all
heroines in all coming-of-age novels. This end, and its
links to controlling the passions, cannot be
overemphasized as the failure to achieve this control
is represented not only as a moral failure but also as
a failure to <em>become</em>, or to prove one&rsquo;s
orphan-self to be, of solid (white) blood.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Vanity Fair</em> provides a tame antidote that
plays upon the pretensions of the sentimental novel
while outing many of its most insipid conventions. And
yet it fleshes out the space between genres, providing
some of the gray area between genteel women&rsquo;s
writing and the cruder yet extremely popular sensation
novels of the period. That these novels existed in a
divided universe of male and female is, I think, an
untenable proposition, one that becomes more strained
as we begin to understand the role of British reprints
in this market and how their often less dogmatic
narratives and more complex characters provide one more
of the missing pieces of this period&rsquo;s literary
history. By so explicitly engaging the formula followed
by conventional sentimental fiction, <em>Vanity
Fair</em> complicates our understanding of readers,
texts, and the relations between them in 1850s
America.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div id="wc_content">
<h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang" align="left"> <em>American Publishers Circular</em>. 10 Jan. 1857. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Armstrong, Nancy. <em>Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel</em>. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Baym, Nina. <em>Novels, Reviewers and Readers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America</em>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Berkovitch, Sacvan, ed. <em>Cambridge History of American Literature</em>. vol. 2. NY: Cambridge UP, 1992. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Blanck, Jacob. "Problems with the Bibliographical Description of Nineteenth Century Books," the <em>Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America</em>. Vol. 36. (1942). </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Berkovitch, Sacvan, ed. <em>Cambridge History of American Literature</em>, vol. 2. NY: Cambridge UP, 1992. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Blanck, Jacob. "Problems with the Bibliographical Description of Nineteenth Century Books." <em> Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America</em>. 36. (1942): 124-36. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Brown, Gillian. <em>Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America</em>. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Campbell, M.J. Hotel St. George, Brooklyn Heights from Harper & Brothers, New York, NY. 29 May 1911. Letter stapled inside New York Public Library copy of W.M. Thackeray, <em>Vanity Fair</em>. New York: Harper & Brothers, n.d. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left">&quot;A Chapter on Novels.&quot; <em>North American Review</em>. Vol. 83, no.173. Oct. 1856. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Cozzens, Frederick William. <em>Prismatics</em>. NY: D. Appleton, 1853. <http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/> </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Cummins, Maria S. <em>The Lamplighter</em>. 1853. New York: American Publishers Corp., n.d. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Curtis, George William. <em>The Potiphar Papers</em>. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1853. <http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/> </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Denning, Michael. <em>Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America</em>. New York: Verso, 1987. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Dever, Carolyn. <em>The Death of the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins</em>. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Dzwonkoski, Peter, ed. <em>American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638-1899</em>. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1986. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left">"Editor's Table." <em>Godey's Lady's Book</em>. Oct 1847.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">"Easy Chair." <em>Harpers New Monthly Magazine</em>. Vol. 8, no. 48. May 1854. <http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/></p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Exnan, Eugene. <em>The Brothers Harper: A Unique Publishing Partnership and its Impact upon the Cultural Life of New York from 1817 to 1853</em>. New York: Harper, 1965. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Flint, Kate. <em>The Woman Reader: 1837-1914</em>. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Haltunnen, Karen. <em>Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America</em>. New York: Yale UP, 1982. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Kaplan, Amy. <em>The Social Construction of American Realism</em>. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> <em>Knickerbocker</em>. Vol. 32, no. 3. Sept. 1848. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Levine, Lawrence. <em>Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America</em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> <em>Living Age</em>. Vol. 18, no. 124. 26 Aug. 1848. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> McHugh, Kathleen. <em>American Domesticity: From How to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama</em>. NY: Oxford UP, 1999. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> <em>National Union Catalog of Pre-1856 Imprints</em>. Vol. 588. London: Mansell, 1968-81. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> <em>North American Review</em>. Vol. 76. Jan. 1853. <http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/>. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Petigru, Sue. <em>Gerald Grays Wife</em>. Augusta, GA: Stockton, 1864. <http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/>. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Reynolds, David. <em>Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville</em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Roorbach, A.O. <em>Bibliotheca Americana: Catalogue of American Publications, Including Reprints and Original Works from 1820-1852 Inclusive</em>. New York: Orville A. Roorbach, 1852. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Samuels, Shireley. <em>The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in 19th Century America</em>. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Tanselle, Thomas G. <em>Guide to the Study of United States Imprints</em>. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Tebbel, John W. <em>A History of Book Publishing in the United States</em>. vol. I. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1972. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Thackeray, W.M. <em>Vanity Fair</em>: <em>A Novel Without a Hero</em>. New York: Penguin Books, 1968. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Tidball, William Linn. <em>Olinda, or the Mexicans Daughter</em>. Cincinatti: H.B. Pearson, 1854.<http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2>. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> <em>United States Democratic Review</em>. Oct. 1848. <http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/></p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Tompkins, Jane. <em>Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860</em>. NY: Oxford UP, 1985. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Warner, Susan. <em>The Wide, Wide World</em>. 1850. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Wilson, James Grant. <em>Thackeray in the United States</em>. 2 vols. London: Smith & Elder, 1901, 1902. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Winship, Michael. <em>Ticknor & Fields: The Business of Literary Publishing in the United States of the Nineteenth Century</em>. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1992. </p>
<p class="hang" align="left"> Wright, Lyle. "A Few Observations on American Fiction, 1851-1875." Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1955. </p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/lefavour-cree">LeFavour, Cree</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1540" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">individualism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1611" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">femininity</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2176" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vanity Fair</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/wm-thackeray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">W.M. Thackeray</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2178" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">American domestic fiction</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2179" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">history of the book</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2180" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sentimental fiction</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2181" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">popular novels</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2182" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">print culture</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/susan-warner" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Warner</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2184" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Wide</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2185" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wide World</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/m-thackeray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">M. Thackeray</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charlotte-bronte" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charlotte Bronte</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/gillian-brown" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gillian Brown</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charles-dickens" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Dickens</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/edward-lytton-bulwer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edward Lytton Bulwer</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/nina-baym" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nina Baym</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/georgiana-fullerton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Georgiana Fullerton</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/amelia-sedley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Amelia Sedley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-reynolds" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David Reynolds</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/fanny-burney" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Fanny Burney</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jane-austen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Austen</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/ellen-montgomery" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ellen Montgomery</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/george-curtis" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Curtis</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jane-tompkins" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Tompkins</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/cincinnati" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cincinnati</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/new-york" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New York</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/wuthering-heights" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wuthering Heights</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:59:45 +0000rc-admin14877 at http://www.rc.umd.edu